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Mallorca Files is a new ten-part daytime cop series which brings a bit of sunshine to the telly when the afternoons are getting all dark and horrible way too soon.
It opens with Brit cop Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys – World War Z) wanting to bring supegrass Niall Taylor (Aidan McArdle) back to blighty, but as often happens in life, nothing ever goes to plan, and since her boss wants her back home ASAP, Miranda would rather stay and investigate what’s been happening… and here comes cliche No.1, since she’s got some annual leave outstanding and anyone with a brain can work out that she’ll use it to stay and do some work. This is because Taylor has been behind at least three gangland murders, and wants to come back to the UK and spill the beans about his cohorts in return for immunity.
Seriously – don’t waste your holiday time doing work, just come home and whack some videogames on.
Anyhoo, before too long, the prim and proper cop teams up with scruffy German beard Max Winter (Julian Looman), and so, there’s cliche No.2 – an odd couple in a cop drama. You know they’ll end up boning each other before the series is out.
Cliche No.3 comes with the pair pretending to be other people in order to get information about the bad guys.
Cliche No.4: the bodies pile up quickly.
As for Cliche No.5… that will be answered within the last ten minutes of the episode, but I won’t spoil that here.
That said, you could probably rack up a whole dozen if you’re really counting, such as a car chase being done on a budget as a golf cart chase.
As for the title, to me, it should really be The Majorca Files, but them Mallorca is the Spanish interpretation of the place, so clearly the BBC have an eye to the worldwide market on that.
Finally, it seems a bit strange that for the prim and proper BBC, they include some mild language such as (and how I’ll describe it here) as the S-word (albeit in German), and the B-word that the Lib Dems are using ‘To Brexit’. All UK channels would slice such words out of the script when broadcasting movies, such as the iconic use of the former swear in Back To The Future.
Mallorca Files begins tomorrow on BBC1 at 2.15pm and runs Monday to Friday for two weeks.
and the series is available to pre-order on DVD ahead of its released on January 13th 2020.
After broadcast, each episode is on the BBC iPlayer.
Episode 1 Score: 4/10
Director: Bryn Higgins
Producer: Dominic Barlow
Creator/Writer: Dan Sefton
Cast:
Miranda Blake: Elen Rhys
Max Winter: Julian Looman
Inés Villegas: Maria Fernandez-Ache
Federico Ramis: Nacho Aldeguer
Stella Taylor: Denise McCormack
Claire Taylor: Tanya Reynolds
Niall Taylor: Aidan McArdle
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.